Warpath (51 page)

“I need you to know
how the cure was found if we’re going to go forward,” He replied.
“I have all the information here, and I’ve made a guide so you
can get through it in a few hours.”

“Show me, then,”
Alice said. “She did something wrong, otherwise the method wouldn’t
be important. Just show me so I can decide and get on with things.”

“She did cross some
ethical lines, and you’re going to find parts hard to watch,”
Carl warned her.

“I see worse when I
try to get some sleep,” Alice said. “Trust me.”

So, he left her alone
in his office with the report, including the recordings and the
forensic analysis. He couldn’t help but be a little proud of how
quickly and thoroughly she looked through the information. The
training she’d had in the Rangers about processing information had
taken root.

He gave her three hours
to look through everything on her own, and she was finished in two.
When he returned to his office, she found that she’d had time to
walk all around the government and operations centre in the upper
half of the Everin Building. Carl Anderson met her at the doorway to
his office and he had difficulty judging her mood as they sat down.
Alice was quiet, but not pensive or morose. She seemed on edge
instead.

The light from the
transparent section of the wall above and behind Carl’s desk bathed
her in hues of gold. She was still in a Civic Watcher’s uniform,
black with a wide white stripe down the sides. Her two weeks off
before the Fleet Academy opened would not be wasted. Alice was just
starting her first patrol shift with The Watch when he called her in.

It was remarkable that
someone with Alice’s mental maturity could train to have new
instincts with the Rangers, that she could sustain and persist
despite her mental problems, and then refuse to remain idle when she
was given the opportunity, taking a temporary full time position
instead. It was remarkable, and Carl Anderson admired her drive and
potential, even though he couldn’t help noticing how small she
looked in the chair in front of his desk. There was a frailty to her
that he’d never noticed before.

“Do you need more
time to think?” Carl asked. “There is no time limit on this
cure.” he said, knowing that she had visited her therapist in the
middle of the previous night. The note in her file said that she woke
up sweating, screaming, and panicking.

“I don’t think so,”
Alice said hesitantly. “You left the whole ethics debate you had
with your Ando at the end of the file. I listened to it while I
watched the other me wake up. She must have been terrified.” She
exhaled slowly and leaned forward, much of her nervous energy
disappearing. “No one else will be hurt if I tell you to do it, if
I die and get rebuilt as this next version of myself without the
framework.”

“That’s true,”
Carl replied. “It won’t be true death either. Your brain will
only be modified to the point of removing any memory blocks and
framework devices.”

“I know,” Alice
said. She took a moment to think. “If I decide that using the cure
is wrong because of how it was made, the suffering that it already
caused will be for nothing,” Alice said. “And we can never know
if Messana would have given the girl she made a life of her own once
she was finished. She was killed by that energy wave on the Fallen
Star.”

“That’s true,
Doctor Messana never had a chance to record her intentions.”

“I can’t believe
that she went too far over the line,” Alice said. “Or that she
wouldn’t do everything she could to make things right if she did.
Not everyone liked her, but she only ever helped us, especially my
father. I have to do it. I am the girl that Messana copied, so I know
all of those copies would have the same answer, they wouldn’t want
their suffering to be for nothing. I can’t believe that Messana’s
end game was evil, and she seems to be one of the only people who
could see what my framework could do to me, that it would only get
worse as time goes on. I have to grow, but I’m regressing while I’m
carrying baggage I can’t handle. I can’t carry a weapon anymore,
because I’m not even sure what I’m seeing from one moment to the
next is actually what’s going on, and I get these paranoia attacks.
I’m falling apart.”

“Mentally, yes,”
Carl said, amazed at how well Alice understood her situation.

“What about
physically? My health tracker says I’ve rolled back younger than
ever, it doesn’t make sense,” Alice said.

“I can check that,
but I suspect your tracker is right.”

“Doctor Anderson,”
Alice said. “Show me to the operating table.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I need this, I
need to have control of my life. The last time I felt free, I was
running across a battlefield. That can’t be it, I need to feel like
my body, like my life is my own again. I want to be a real girl, with
all that comes with it, and I think I’m pretty sure I could do
worse than be genetically tied to your daughter and my dad. I guess
that’s the problem, I’m going to have to wait for him to come
back. I’m technically not an adult.”

She was desperate,
excited, and then morose. Watching the sway of her emotions, then the
final downturn made him want to help her. “I’ve seen framework
technology send scientists into a frenzy,” he said. “There is
something about the combination of technologies that made then carry
the research forward, try it under the most inappropriate
circumstances. The Order has turned framework systems into a method
of building a soldier wrapped in flesh, and there are strings
attached. I have a theory I was afraid to share before. Your
framework is the latest generation the Order has, and I believe a
part of what you’re experiencing was made to act as a kind of
corrosion, just in case a soldier becomes fully self-aware and
decides to escape. I also believe that there is something
undiscovered in your system that can be activated by an Order of Eden
device that could erase everything in your system and reboot you as a
blank soldier. That is one of the reasons why I suggested that you
stay here, though I am pretty sure your father already wanted the
same thing.”

“Okay, now I’m not
just sad, but bloody terrified,” Alice said with a nervous laugh.

“You won’t have to
be for long. You are such a brilliant girl, you remind me of both my
daughters, the one I could not admit fatherhood to, then the one I
made. I need you to be well.”

“Thank you, but,
we’ll still have to wait,” Alice said, surprised.

“No,” Carl said.
“Technically, no. Your father left your care in my hands. While he
is out of the solar system, you are my responsibility. I can’t
watch you suffer, and I can’t have you at this level of risk.”

“So, how soon can I
do this?” Alice asked.

Carl Anderson thought
for a moment, considering what could go wrong one last time. There
were so few risks, and no matter what, he knew he could keep her
alive. “You sat through all that footage, and the reports,” he
said. “So, any time you’re ready. Understand, you will feel
different when it’s finished. You won’t be left on your own
either, not for weeks.”

“Yes, just, yes!”
she exclaimed.

“That sounds certain
to me,” Carl said.

There was a scratch on
Minh-Chu Buu’s helmet that would never come out. It was a near
miss. Shrapnel from the inside of his gunship would have done him
critical harm if it struck just twenty centimetres lower. He was more
fortunate than his crew. He watched Sticky and Maid get pulled out of
his gunship and dragged off to medical. When the medical technician
gave him the thumbs up for both his crewmembers, indicating that
they’d be all right after some attention in the infirmary, Minh-Chu
just leaned against the damaged port side of his ship.

He could not stop
himself from reviewing the events of the last hour in his head. He
was in a gunship, armed with heavy fighter turrets, missile pods, and
heavy munitions. He was one of the most protected members of his
squadron, and it was his responsibility to not only use his tools
effectively, but to make sure his squadron was where they had to be,
when they had to be there. He couldn’t get past the fact that it
was his responsibility to make sure that his wingmen weren’t
ordered into unnecessarily unsafe situations. No matter how he
considered the very real scenario in his head, he couldn’t come to
any conclusion other than that he’d underestimated their enemy then
led Jinx and his co-pilot to their deaths.

Minh-Chu took several
steps away from his gunship and looked at it. There were holes
straight through the ship’s armour surrounded by dents and scorch
marks. They didn’t have to use the main hatch to pull his two
crewmembers out of the shuttle, the break in the starboard armour was
larger. He stared at it until his vision blurred and he was seeing
nothing but blurred colour. Jinx followed his orders without question
straight into a trap. Revenant was a good pilot, no, he was a great
fighter pilot. Minh-Chu should have treated that differently, he
should have called half the wing down on him, given him nowhere to
run, no place to hide.

Instead he took the job
of killing the loudest mouth the enemy had himself for no logical
reason. He was running a gunship, and should have assisted the more
agile Uriels, not pretended he was still flying a starfighter. Every
gunship in the field had more assists than he did.

“Sir?” asked an
Ensign in a heavy yellow vacsuit. The extra layers of armour and
synthetic muscle didn’t match the face behind the visor. It was
like seeing a bodybuilder with the head of slim fifteen-year old
girl. “Are you all right? You’ve been standing here awhile,”
she said quietly.

“I’m fine, sorry,”
Minh-Chu looked back at his fighter for a moment. “Guess you have
to drag this wreck off for repairs.”

“Yes, Sir,” the
Ensign said. “And we’re coming out of wormhole transit in a few
minutes. Your squadron will be returning to the Revenge, escorting
three personnel shuttles.”

Minh-Chu glanced at his
command and control unit, finding that there was an update from the
Flight Operations Centre telling him the same thing. It was several
minutes old. “Heading back into another wormhole after that. Thank
you, Ensign, carry on,” Minh-Chu said softly. Everyone who could
contest his next decision would be busy on the bridge. He waited
until he was inside the lift and behind closed doors before he
accessed the Officer’s controls on his arm unit. “Am I sure?”
he asked himself. The lift moved up one level and stopped.

Carnie loped into the
elevator car. The man was a full head taller than Minh-Chu, and the
knotted strands of blonde hair made him recognizable from almost any
distance. At least, that’s what everyone assumed.

Carnie looked at the
command and rank display screen on Minh-Chu’s control unit and
shook his head. “Yeah, you’re not gonna do that,” he said. “I
need you, man. My mates in this wing, the ones on duty and the ones
who are coming on line when the other hangars are done need you to
get us through this shit storm.”

“I’ve been here
before,” Minh-Chu said, not thinking about the words coming out of
his mouth, not filtering for once. “I’ve never been trained to
handle this rank, Wing Commander. I didn’t go through Officer
training like our Captain, like the Admiral. I got a month of Officer
Prep, nothing compared to their year, and some of them got even
more,” he said sourly. “I can barely make the right decisions for
myself, what business do I have taking your life in my hands. I can
come up with a strategy in a briefing room, but I lose focus out
there.”

“Man, you look at my
training logs,” Carnie said. “Sixty three hours of watching your
combat playbacks and counting. Not including the ones I watched over,
and over. I watch your dashboard too, what you’re doing, what
you’re telling everyone else to do and when. That’s me watching
your greatest hits, in simulation and in real combat. I’ve been
flying since I was nine, but I’ve never learned as much about
tactics, running a ship, systems management, or shooting as I have in
the last few weeks. Yeah, maybe you made your duel with Revenant
personal, a mistake you warned us about in those training recordings,
but it happens once in every pilot’s career if they see enough
action. Until I joined your outfit every fight was personal.
Defending our convoy wasn’t my job, it was my duty, like some kinda
higher purpose. I was fighting assholes off so they wouldn’t steal
our kids, kill our families, take our shit and leave the survivors
stranded. That’s personal, and we lost focus all the time. We were
a bunch of idiot hotheads. I didn’t know it then, but I do now. If
we had just one guy that was half the leader you are up there with
us, we wouldn’t lose people in almost every fight. Our convoy would
have been untouchable, no one would even bother messing with us
carnies after a while.”

“Some of us have
grown as much as we can as leaders,” Minh-Chu said. “I’ll stick
with the wing, but I won’t lead.”

Carnie mashed the STOP
button on the elevator. “Hell, no. You’re not putting this burden
down. I might not know you as well as the Officers on this ship, but
I see a leader when you’re in that briefing room, a role model. I
didn’t have a dad growing up, the repair droids on my ship took
care of me as much as anyone did. The guy I dreamt about, the one who
would swoop in and adopt me, the one I made up in my head sounded a
lot like you do. He wouldn’t leave his wing to deal with these
Order pricks on their own. He wouldn’t walk away from his kids.”

Minh-Chu looked at
Carnie and realized how very young he really was. His height, his
scraggly hair and sure step were deceiving. In truth, the man was
only eighteen, too young for a stop shot. “I don’t know what to
say, I led someone into a trap today and didn’t see it coming. I
wasn’t in the right place for most of that fight.”